God, how I adore that little book!
That one stays with you, and affects you in so many ways, long after you've read it. It forces you to ask why am I doing what I'm doing? What does it mean? What's important? How would we start over? How valuable is all that has gone before us in building the world that we live in?
I thought I was the only one.
I read it when I was in my early teens. It's plot formed the basis of many an adolescent day dream. I had forgotten the title and was thinking of it one day, and fooled around with variations of the title, trying to find it one day on Amazon.com. Finally got it right, ordered a copy and devoured it again at the age of 30. Just as powerful, but strangely different. It does make you think about the fragility of civilization, especially the ending. The protaganists love for the library at the University, and his favorite son's aptitude for reading is so poignant, and speaks so well to the idea of a "democracy of the dead" and the value of tradition and society handed down from one generation to the next. And how that string could be cut.
Another great one, in this vein, is Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. I read that in college, and along with Bork's The Tempting of America, I came to a place where when I finally wrote my senior thesis, my advisor (one of the last of the great "centrists") asked when I had become such a right-winger. I think he was mistaken. I had simply become a classical liberal, in love with the concept of tradition and western civilization.
I use it as a measuring stick to see how my worldview changes at each stage in my life. Which, as you know is a core premise of the book; how the worldview and life changes for Ish from his life saving snakebite, to his death on the rusted out Golden Gate Bridge.
The book is enduring but underated. I have my original copy, much as Ish had his hammer.
I have never talked to anybody else who has read that. That was a great book wasn't it?